A cartload of thanks to Mike for turning me on to this photographer! I'd used the photo above in a previous post but I had no idea who did it. I thought some anonymous glamour photographer just got lucky. Boy, was I wrong! I should have known that only a fine artist could have made a picture like that.
Here's (above) another of Mortensen's portraits, this time of writer and mystic Manly Hall.
Above, a bust of Manly by an unknown artist. Wow! A room with that picture and that bust must have made quite an impression.
You'd expect Mortensen to have been the subject of universal acclaim but that wasn't the case at all. Read this excerpt from his Wikipedia entry:
Geez, even Ansel Adams disliked him. Apparently modernists saw his return to Romantic, touched up, Steiglitz-type photography as retrograde. Even Steiglitz failed to support him.
Mortensen worked for the Hollywood studios but his real passion was for occult subjects (above).
He must have had a hard time keeping his professional and private life separate. Here's (above) a portrait for hire that must have shocked the person who commissioned it. At first glance it's a conventional portrait but stare at it for a moment and you get the creepy feeling that the picture is staring back at you. It's as if you're being watched by someone in Hell.
'Another creepy one.
'And another. Okay, that's enough of this!
